Is Manual Labor A Secret, Badass Workout Substitute?

There I was. It was a Monday afternoon. I had nary an idea for a blog post. There was so much to get done in my real life that I might even have to postpone the week’s post. Just then, a twinkle of an idea… What if I could combine what I had to get done in my real life with a blog post somehow? 

Whelp, surprise! I think I nailed it. You’ll see.

Over the last few weeks, in an effort to move the needle on our side yard’s metamorphosis into a vegetable garden, I’ve been busy. Here’s how it looks all tilled up:

To add to that, I built up a small retaining wall out of 6x6s to help level out the area and add much-needed garden soil to our existing garbage-y clay soil. I ordered 8 cubic yards of leafgro (a rich, compost mixture) and had it delivered to our driveway today in a huge pile.

If I was going to try and move this soil today, I would definitely not have time to do my normal workout and still get to pick up the Little Man from preschool in time. I’d have to get creative. It’s going to take a lot of work to move all that soil. Surely, I thought, this could be a great workout substitute. Right? 

No, seriously. Am I right? I’ve actually substituted physically-demanding tasks like this for workouts a lot over the years, but is that actually effective? Often when you come inside after mowing the lawn on a hot day, you feel as if you’ve exercised, right? I mean, you’re sweaty—that’s a telltale sign of working hard. But mowing the lawn is not exactly what I would call physically demanding… Maybe it’s just the heat that makes you sweat.

So that’s where I ended up with my post idea. Was shoveling and moving topsoil an effective substitute for a typical gym workout?* I’d be filling up my wheelbarrow, moving it about 70 feet, emptying it, and coming back for more. Many times.

A Thought Exercise

A quick Google-y search didn’t give me a great indication of how many calories I would be burning shoveling and wheelbarrowing dirt at a moderate-to-high intensity. My best bet, I decided, was to approximate the activity using a combination of other activities.

According to a site I found, NutriStrategy, which lists the amount of calories burned in an hour for humans of different weights, “shoveling snow by hand” burns about 450 calories per hour for someone my size. “Carrying heavy loads” (open to interpretation)** burns about 600 calories per hour for someone my size. Sound like a good activity approximation if we mix these together?

That said, even these two activities are subject to differences based on intensity. If I had been doing this work just to finish it efficiently, I would have lowered my intensity and taken far more time. But remember, I was doing this work, in part, to act as a workout substitute. The only way I can reasonably relate the intensity is to look at it through the lens of running, which that same site happens to list on its table of calories burned. Had I focused on just getting the work done efficiently without tiring myself out too much, perhaps we could call that running at 6 mph (which would be around 750 calories for someone my weight). I upped the intensity to what I would estimate at about 7 mph (around 875 calories), which is almost a 17 percent increase in calories burned. 

If we return to our original idea that shoveling and moving topsoil was a mix between “shoveling snow by hand” and “carrying heavy loads,” then we can probably split the difference between 450 and 600 calories to get 525 calories burned per hour. To try and factor in the intensity angle, I think it’s safe to add in our ~17 percent multiplier, which brings us to 612 calories burned per hour. With me so far?

What other activities would burn about that amount of calories per hour based on my size? Some examples, according to the NutriStrategy table:

• Running 5 mph
• Cycling, 12-13.9 mph, moderate
• Calisthenics, vigorous, push-ups, sit-ups, etc.
• Rowing machine, vigorous***
• Competitive basketball game
• Playing lacrosse
• Slowly jumping rope
• Singles tennis

And in an effort to provide all two of you readers with some more detail about my topsoil-moving, manual labor “workout,” I stopped every so often to check my pulse and calculate beats per minute. Over the course of my work, it ranged from 144-156, which I would call “moderate intensity.” However, the Mayo Clinic classifies this as “vigorous exercise intensity,” so it’s nice to know how skewed my own personal views are on exercise norms.

Oh yeah, and since exercise is a function of intensity, size of the person, and duration, I guess I should say that moving the 8 yards of dirt took exactly two hours. This timeframe makes me happy for a few reasons. First, it’s longer than I typically exercise for on a given day, so that’s a win right there. Second, I feel like I accomplished a task in a short amount of time that most people could not replicate no matter how hard they tried. I call that a win for persistently exercising and taking good care of myself–a pat on the back, if you will. Third, it’s a long enough duration of exercise that I can look back on it, while sitting comfortably in my chair writing this, and think “that’s why I feel so smoked right now. I’m not just getting old!”

So What’s The Verdict? 

Is manual labor a good substitute for a gym workout? 

Yes and no. 

YES: From the perspective of building physical work capacity, manual labor is a badass substitute for carrying around weights, sandbags, whatever, around aimlessly (that’s often what you’ll see prescribed to build work capacity for athletes). From the perspective of doing a healthy activity to keep your ticker in good shape, manual labor seems like it can also have significant benefits if you do it with any amount of intensity.

NO: From the perspective of building other physical abilities, not so much. You will probably not be able to run faster, jump higher, or move more weight around compared to spending an equal amount of time in a gym. 

But that’s what it came down to today… I spent two hours out in the sunshine, doing a job that I had to get done, that will enable me to go to bed tonight feeling like I physically accomplished something today. That’s a feeling that you don’t often get in a gym. And doesn’t it seem so much better when I put it that way?

Oh, and here’s my new retaining wall filled with dirt. That will eventually be tilled into the existing soil and leveled out for planting. The new garden veggie garden area should take up the entire dirt foreground of the photo below on the left. It’s gonna be awesome!

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*Testing this would have been far easier if I had a working fitness tracker-watch-thingy. I could have given you accurate-ish insights into calories burned, average heart rate, distance traveled, etc. Oh well.

**My definition of heavy is probably not the same definition used to determine what “heavy” is, which makes me very happy on the inside.

***This doesn’t track for me, NutriStrategy. If I vigorously use a rowing machine, it beats the crap out of running at 5 mph for intensity purposes. Maybe, like my footnote above, it’s just a different interpretation of “vigorous.”